Norman Lear's Left-Wing Paranoia About 'The Right'

They're coming for your children! They're coming for the womenfolk! Then they're coming after you! Norman Lear, the famous television show producer, offered this hysterically paranoid assessment of the allegedly growing and presumably insidious power of "the right":

"I want to suggest that we lefties start laying claim to what we see as 'sacred' and serve it up proudly to the religious right -- to the James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Karl Rove ... hatemongers, sheathed in sanctity, and to the Koch brothers, the types that fund them and use them so effectively for their own political power-grabbing purposes. Over the past several decades, the power-grabbing right has built a powerful infrastructure -- radio and TV stations and networks. They've built think tanks, colleges and law schools."

How accurate is Lear's assessment of the supposed power and influence of the right? Is the right steadily forming a formidable alliance of academics, media outlets, websites, etc., that serve as a fourth column for the "right wing"? Even if this were true, what about the power of the left?

Let's look at the mainscream media. In "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind," UCLA economist and political science professor Dr. Tim Groseclose uses three different methods to determine the SQ -- or slant quotient -- of the major media outlets. Of the 20 most prominent news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, "Good Morning America" and Time magazine, he found only two that leaned to the right: The Washington Times and Fox News.

True, the network evening news shows no longer hold the market share of years past, but nearly 25 million Americans still turn to Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams and Scott Pelley each night. That means eight times as many viewers watch ABC/NBC/CBS as watch "The O'Reilly Factor," the top-rated cable news/talk program.

When people like Lear speak of the growing power of the right-wing cabal, they believe Fox leads the charge. And Bill O'Reilly is clearly the face of the Fox News network. But as hated as O'Reilly is by the left, how legitimate is their description of O'Reilly as a right-wing ideologue?

Misc.

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